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November 03, 2003
Its arrived. The excitement of the carnival that stops a nation.
The spectacle that is called the Melbourne Cup. This is not just a horse race. It is an example of the spectacle in the Situationist Internantional sense.
They held that that capitalism had turned all relationships transactional, and that life had been reduced to a "spectacle". Two points are made. First, they reworked Marx's view of alienation, as developed in his early writings. The worker is alienated from his product and from his fellow workers and finds himself living in an alien world The increasing division of labor and specialization have transformed work into meaningless drudgery. Where is the creativity in working on aa conveyor belt?
Secondly, they added to Marx. They argued that in order to ensure continued economic growth, capitalism has created "pseudo-needs" to increase consumption. Modern capitalist society is a consumer society, a society of "spectacular" commodity consumption. Having long been treated with the utmost contempt as a producer, the worker is now lavishly courted and seduced as a consumer.
Hence we have a society of the spectacle. As Guy Debord says:
"The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively..... In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities."
In a society of the spectacle, everything is image and all we seem to have left are references to other references. Just think of al the marketing and advertising associated with this spectacle.
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